4 ms·
The long term productivity of this dev team is insane. They need to write a book on how they sustain it, and sell it to every single AAA studio.
by brucethemoose2 3y ago
The long term productivity of this dev team is insane. They need to write a book on how they sustain it, and sell it to every single AAA studio.
- mwerty 3y agoAgreed. I'm surprised they release unpaid updates as opposed to paid DLCs. Wonder how they manage.
- sjackso 3y agoThe timing and text of this announcement certainly suggest that they've been gearing up to be a launch title on Apple's headset. Which makes me wonder if Apple's been funding development, perhaps for some time.
- gjsman-1000 3y agoCould be... Great news for the dozens of Mac gamers. If Apple's headset is a success(?) and games want to support their headset, adding Mac support will be very easy to justify.
- smoldesu 3y agoIt would also not be surprising if this was another "Tomb Raider" moment, though. Bringing No Man's Sky to Mac required a Metal rewrite, and Hello Games had probably already finished porting to ARM for the Switch version of the game. It's still a hard sell unless you're a studio with nothing to lose like Sean's team or Capcom.
- automatic6131 3y ago>I'm surprised they release unpaid updates as opposed to paid DLCs From what I hear, from someone who knows someone who works at Hello Games, is that they've hired people to work on "the next game project", but NMS keeps selling, so they keep putting out big updates, because every time they do that, more people buy the game.
- reaperducer 3y agothey keep putting out big updates, because every time they do that, more people buy the game. Your friend of a friend must be mistaken. We've been assured hundreds of times over by experts on HN that putting out quality software will lead to bankruptcy. The only correct way to success is to build a low-grade MVP, then charge a monthly subscription, then sell the user's personal data and "telemetry." Surely, there can't be another way?
- loeg 3y agoDo you remember how No Man's Sky was marketed and launched? I do.
- uMeanTest 3y agoSame as everyone else’s now long defunct app was marketed in the midst of a hype bubble. Marketers gonna market. Difference is the NMS team appears to have an offering people wanted versus Bear Clone #875 and web UI POC skewed to highlight some banal metric for $99/mo per team member #1,773,958
- sdfghswe 3y agoWhat's insane is the comeback. I remember them being the most hated people on the planet in the months following launch. I at least don't normally associate people that have a sloppy launch with people who are in it for the long haul. Respect.
- lyu07282 3y agoJust in the off-chance that anyone hasn't seen this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5BJVO3PDeQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5BJVO3PDeQ it goes over this entire saga from failure at launch to massive success
- ChuckNorris89 3y agoHa, I'm happy to see another Internet Historian connoisseur. Can recommend his other videos as well, highly entertaining and very well researched. Also, for videos on video-games, he has another, "secret" channel, most don't know about: https://www.youtube.com/@IHstorymode/videos https://www.youtube.com/@IHstorymode/videos
- lyu07282 3y agoyep! there is also a third one, Incognito Mode: https://www.youtube.com/@IHincognitoMode https://www.youtube.com/@IHincognitoMode
- sdfghswe 3y agoThank you!! Watching it over dinner tonight :-)
- secretsatan 3y agoI never read or saw any of the press regarding NMS, just saw it come up on in the store and thought it looked pretty cool and bought it because i wanted a space game. I was actually pretty happy with it and mentioned it to a friend who then informed me of the drama. I felt like it did seem rather overblown, i don’t do multiplayer so that wasn’t an issue and from playing elite i was pretty used to rather sparse universes, really like the aesthetic of it and not having read any of the press had no idea i what i was supposed to be expecting.
- gumballindie 3y agoThe game is pretty basic and buggy tho.
- burnte 3y agoBuggy? Sure, no more so than any title. Basic, though? It hasn't been basic in YEARS. After the first couple major updates it got pretty feature rich FAST.
- iamjake648 3y agoThat might have been true at launch five years ago, but the amount of content is pretty insane after all of the updates they've done to the game. Haven't run into really any bugs in 40+ hours of playtime.
- saghm 3y agoI can think of a number of AAA titles from the past few years from larger studios with plenty of pugs as well...
- nerdjon 3y agoI'm sorry but have you actually played it since it launched? Or ever? I really feel like we (HN) should be better than just parroting blogs and YouTubers and be better about actually talking about something in an informed manner instead. This is the type of response I expect on steam or some other gaming site where people are incapable of making their own decisions and instead just parrot someone else.
- xk_id 3y agoNothing has proved more conclusively than crypto threads that you cannot really expect HN to be above that standard of discourse. Maybe it once was, but very few people have been spared by the polarising, indignation-fuelling, engagement maximising tactics of social media influencers.
- emptysongglass 3y agoIndeed. I'll add the proliferation of AI doomers driving actual ML researchers away to that tally. And cookie banner defenders.
- ladberg 3y agoI don't really think they have any secret sauce that AAA studios don't have, the explanation is just that they've continued work on the game after release. For any other AAA game, nearly all the developers pivot to working on the next project after release so you don't see as substantial updates.
- mewse-hn 3y agoOr they get canned
- brucethemoose2 3y agoI disagree. Hello games has ~40 employees, apparently up from ~20 years ago. 343 has over 500 employees... maybe 750? I am not sure. But they spent at least an order of magnitude more manhours on Halo Infinite (not even counting help from other Microsoft branches and carryover work from 3 previous Halo games), and just look at how Infinite ended up compared to NMS.
- marginalia_nu 3y agoSeems about right. Software dev scales very poorly with number of devs. Optimum team size is like 3-4.
- ricardobayes 3y agoDefinitely, you can bring the stars down with 4 well-managed and motivated full time-devs.
- brucethemoose2 3y agoI guess this is true. Seems like the game dev sweetspot is "AA" sized, like Hello Games, Coffee Stain, maybe Obsidian... its where economies of scale really kick in, but beyond that studios quickly hit all sorts of scaling issues.
- badlucklottery 3y agoI worked in the games industry for a short amount of time and have a few friends still in it (less and less as the years go by) so that's what I'm basing this opinion on. Anyway, a big part of the efficiency issues with AAA studios is they generally get fully or close to fully underway on a design that mostly goes into the trash before launch. So they aren't really developing one game, they're developing several with varying amounts of overlap and completeness. The development of Doom Eternal is a high-profile (and very successful) example of this. This is also why the industry is unfortunately fueled on crunch: sure it took 4+ years to deliver the final product but much of the final game shaped up in the last 6-12 months. It's a miracle more games don't need year+ delays. From what I've seen, indie studios tend to spend a much larger percentage of the development cycle prototyping and iterating before going into full production. They do this because they can (less overhead from idle staff) and because have to (they can't afford to spend years spinning their wheels). It's much more efficient but it also limits scope (which has some big downsides).